The global pandemic interrupted many people’s lives in 2020. Families were separated. Relationships were tested. Unfortunately, lives were lost. Many who suffered from the loss of family and/or friends were unable to say their final goodbyes or spend their final moments together. The same goes for R&B singer Kelly Price, who is dealing with the passing of her mother. According to Price, she only laid eyes on her mother once during the pandemic, and it wasn’t how she expected.
Kelly Price and her sisters were raised by their mother in the projects of Far Rockaway, Queens in New York. The singer’s life was brewed in a strong religious upbringing. They would attend the Full Gospel Mission Church of God in Christ, where her mother, Claudia Price-North, served as musical director and her grandfather, Bishop Jerome Norman, was pastor. The reason for the global pandemic was also the reason that many people passed away. It would also be the same reason that Kelly Price’s grandfather left this earth. Complications from the virus led to his passing in the spring of 2020.
“I’m grateful that I had him for all those years,” she told Houston’s The Core 94. “But it just seems that for everything that he’s lived through; surviving cancer on more than one occasion, surviving a heart attack on more than one occasion, coming through racism, being born in the South. Just for the things that he survived, I guess for me it just feels crazy that it would be this that takes him from us.”
Kelly Price further vowed in the interview that she would continue to make her grandfather proud and that she is happy that he is no longer suffering. Price shared recent moments of her being with her grandparents during one of the last times that he was alive.
Death’s sting would unexpectedly hit the singer again a mere 6-months later. On October 18, 2020, Claudia Price-North took her final breath. With “so many unexplainable emotions,” Price issued a statement to share the news.
“This is something I wasn’t prepared for, none of us were and I don’t know that anyone under any circumstances ever could be,” Kelly Price wrote. No cause of death was given, but she was noted to be a breast cancer survivor after being diagnosed in the 90s. If the news of her unexpected passing was not enough, Price recently shared with The Breakfast Club that the only time she laid eyes on her mother in 2020 was in a casket.
The loss of so many loved ones could easily break the strongest person. For Price, she declared that she would not be broken following the hard 2020 that she experienced. “2020 will not destroy me. 2020 will not take away my faith or my joy,” the singer exclaimed on Instagram. “2020 will be my year of overcoming some of the biggest blows the enemy sent! They formed but they will not prosper! Neither will they destroy my life. Even with my [broken heart], I know my life and my times are in His hands.”
